The Liberating Experience: War Correspondents, Red Army Soldiers, and the Nazi Extermination Camps ANITA KONDOYANIDI “I have visited [Auschwitz]. I saw everything with my own eyes. I love you even more now. Please be calm: this will not happen again, mother. We, soldiers, will take care of it.” Vladimir Brylev I n 1945, V. Letnikov’s wife received a letter from her husband, a Red Army soldier fighting on the Western front. “I envy you,” he wrote. You are already on vacation. When will it end? You do not write me long letters, but I am interested in every trivial detail of your life. Reading about it is my vacation. Yesterday we examined a death camp for 120,000 prisoners. Posts two meters high with electric fencing enclose the camp. In addition, the Germans mined everything. Watchtowers for armed guards and machineguns stand fifty meters apart. Not far away from the death barracks is the crematorium. Can you imagine how many people the Germans have burned there? Next to this exploded crematorium, there are bones, bones, and piles of shoes several meters high. There are children’s shoes in the pile. Total horror, impossible to describe.1 Although Letnikov did not specify the name of the camp and the date he saw it, his description and reaction echoed many other soldiers’ sketches and responses, which also confirmed the descriptions of the leading war correspondents. The Soviet press published I dedicate this article to my beloved mentor, Richard Stites, who encouraged me to explore this and many other topics. I conducted my research at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, and at the European Reading Room at the Library of Congress, whose staff was exceptionally helpful. 1 V. Letnikov, “Pis'mo zhene,” undated, Ia eto videl: Novye pis'ma o voine, ed. E. Maksimova and A. Danilevich (Moscow, 2005), 145. The editors did not include Letnikov’s full name. The Russian Review 69 (July 2010): 438–62 Copyright 2010 The Russian Review The Liberating Experience 439 numerous depictions of the camps by well-known Soviet correspondents such as Ilya Ehrenburg, Konstantin Simonov, Boris Gorbatov, and Vasilii Grossman, while The Soviet News in London disseminated this information among the Allies. Since June 22, 1941, Red Army troops had witnessed the mass extermination of Soviet citizens on their own land, but they had not encountered crimes committed on such a concentrated and and well-organized scale until they liberated Majdanek, Treblinka, and Sobibor in July 1944 and Auschwitz in January 1945.2 The Soviet liberation of the eastern concentration camps has not attracted much attention from historians. By its nature, the liberation of one factory of death resembled the liberation of another. Jon Bridgman, the first historian to cover the pre- and post-liberation events, focused exclusively on the liberation of the concentration camps by American troops, demarcating the pre-liberation period from January to April 1945 and ending the post-liberation period in August 1945. His book devoted only ten pages to an analysis of how the Soviet soldiers freed the inmates and the reaction of the Soviet leadership.3 Historians of the Holocaust have also paid little attention to the Soviet liberation of the concentration camps.4 In their brilliant studies of World War II, journalist Alexander Werth and historians Richard Overy and Christopher Duffy mention it only briefly.5 As for the Russian studies of World War II, there are two short paragraphs dedicated to the liberation of the concentration camps in the impressive four-volume History of World War II written by a group of Russian historians.6 In twenty-five volumes of Russian Archives: World War II, a systematic collection of World War II documents, the editors published only directives to liberate Lublin.7 It remains unclear whether the Soviet government issued any orders to liberate the concentration camps. In their recently published studies of World War II, neither Valerii Avgustinovich nor Sergei Pereslegin mentions how the Soviet soldiers freed the camps.8 This article recreates the story of the Soviet soldiers and their reaction to the horror that they encountered in Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz. The evidence also demonstrates that the existence of the German extermination camps and Soviet political propaganda fueled the soldiers’ revenge, which by the end of the war had become routine. 2 Soviet soldiers liberated Majdanek on July 23, 1944, Treblinka on July 25, 1944, and Auschwitz on January 27, 1944. It is not known exactly when Soviet troops discovered Sobibor, probably in July 1944 as well. 3 Jon Bridgman, The End of the Holocaust: The Liberation of the Camps (Portland, 1990). 4 See Sybille Steinbacher, Auschwitz: A History (New York, 2005); Jacek Lachendro, German Places of Extermination in Poland (Marki, 2007); Józef Marszalek, Majdanek: The Concentration Camp in Lublin (Warsaw, 1986); Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: the Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington, 1987); Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (New York, 1981); Jules Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp (New York, 2007). 5 See Alexander Werth, Russia at War (New York, 1964), 888–99; Richard Overy, Russia’s War (New York, 1997), 261; and Christopher Duffy, Red Storm on the Reich (New York, 1991), 3, 93–94, 274. 6 V. A. Zolotarev et. al., Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina 1941–1945 (Moscow, 1999). 7 V. A. Zolotarev et al., eds., Russkii arkhiv: Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina (RA VOV), 25 vols. (Moscow, 1993–). 8 Valerii Avgustinovich, Velikaia Otechestvennaia: Perelom istorii (Moscow, 2008); Sergei Pereslegin, Vtoraia mirovaia: Voina mezhdu realnostiami (Moscow, 2006). 440 Anita Kondoyanidi SOURCES To corroborate my ideas, I use mainly original transcripts of the Red Army’s political department meetings and soldiers’ letters culled from 444 memoirs and collections of letters. How reliable are these letters? Although the Main Department of Propaganda (MDP) instituted military censorship during the war, it is difficult to appraise how successful censors were in rooting out dissent and how often censorship prevented soldiers from writing what they really thought. Before the censors caught onto Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1945, he carried on an active correspondence with his friend, Nikolai Vitkevich. If the censorship had been so pervasive, Solzhenitsyn would have been much more cautious and the censors aware of his dangerous ideas long before his arrest. Only years later, Solzhenitsyn realized that the military censors became suspicious of his letter because “that one letter” was too thick and easy to spot in the pile.9 In fact, a quick study of the directives issued between July 1941 and May 1945 demonstrates that the MDP banned the divulging of military secrets in soldiers’ letters only on March 2, 1942.10 In May 1942 another directive urged the political departments to improve the Red Army’s postal service due to slow deliveries and mismanagement of mail.11 At the end of 1942 and between 1943 and 1944 the MDP reissued these directives with regular frequency, which already indicates that neither the soldiers nor the Army’s mail carriers followed the directives to the letter.12 Undoubtedly, the terror of the 1930s shaped Soviet culture. Denunciations of one’s colleagues and friends and panegyrics to the Soviet government became the norm. People were afraid to express their true feelings and thoughts. However, the war changed this state of mind. As Vasilii Grossman observed, Red Army soldiers fought not only for their own but also for their country’s freedom. Having lost their families to Soviet and Nazi terror, Soviet soldiers had nothing else to lose. This state of mind liberated them from fear of expressing their emotions and thoughts openly. For Solzhenitsyn, the war established a new norm of life. In the words of his well-known autobiographical character, Gleb Nerzhin: “May people in Rus' say aloud what they think!”13 Moreover, there is no evidence that the Soviet government expected soldiers to describe the horrors of the camps in their letters. To this end, war correspondents published numerous articles to inform Soviet and foreign audiences of the Nazis’ atrocities. That is why I think the letters, which demonstrate the soldiers’ anger and deep hatred of the enemy, are not fake or written to cater to the Soviet government. Many soldiers went to the camps and saw mountains of corpses and living skeletons, piles of adult and children’s shoes, sacks with hair, and gas chambers. Some of them heard about the conduct of Nazi camp personnel from the victims themselves. Together with the victims, they witnessed how German POWs dug out the dead bodies at Majdanek.14 Undoubtedly, soldiers used “Bolshevik” language Liudmila Saraskina, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Moscow, 2008), 248. “Direktiva 18 O nedopushchenii razglasheniia voennoi tainy v pis'makh voenno-sluzhashchikh,” RA VOV 6:111. 11 “Direktiva 67 ob uluchshenii partiino-politicheskoi raboty v organakh polevoi pochty,” RA VOV 6:134. 12 See RA VOV , vol. 6. 13 Quoted from Saraskina, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 267. 14 Nikolai Popel. Vperedi Berlin! (Moscow, 1970), 117. 9 10 The Liberating Experience 441 and expressed their views in tropes used by war correspondents and representatives from the political department. However, this fact in no way undermines the frankness of their letters. The transcripts also show how reading Ehrenburg’s or Simonov’s articles tapped into the soldiers’ feelings of angst and revulsion at the camps, turning these negative emotions into military rage. Both transcripts and letters echo each other. Fueled by the ferocious and bloodthirsty language of hate propaganda, soldiers became thirsty for revenge. For them, “fascists” stood for all of Germany. WAR CORRESPONDENTS AND SOVIET PROPAGANDA Since the outbreak of the war, Stalin and the Soviet leadership had mobilized the population for the war effort by whipping up national and even religious sentiment. Soviet propaganda aimed at foreigners shed its revolutionary and anti-bourgeois elements and instead emphasized issues uniting the Allies. In 1941 the Soviet leadership launched an impressive appeal to Russian patriotism and a campaign to foster national sentiment among the USSR’s non-Russian peoples. It organized meetings of various ethnic representatives. An all-Slavic rally took place in early August 1941, while Soviet Jews held a meeting two weeks later.15 The participants and speakers at these events did not identify directly with the party or the state. Ironically, the war caused a domestic thaw as well as a temporary and relative decentralization of power, at least until 1943. “The new concatenation of images, stories, voices, and personages,” Jeffrey Brooks observed, “did not mark an institutional revival of civil society, but for a time journalists displayed a world in which Stalin said little and in which some authority shifted to others.”16 While in the 1930s the news largely contained directives and orders from above, in 1941 the Soviet government had to reshape the public imagination to suit “unyieldingly practical problems of fighting and surviving in wartime.”17 The number of newspapers published in the army and navy grew exponentially. There were 1,357 military newspapers with a daily circulation of 6,256,000 copies. Simultaneously, the number of central large-circulation newspapers halved: out of thirtynine regularly published newspapers only eighteen remained. In Moscow and Moscow province alone, 181 factory newspapers ceased to exist.18 The MDP even ordered the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” removed from the military newspapers’ mastheads, to be replaced by “Death to the German occupiers!”19 To inspire soldiers the MDP also ordered war correspondents to publicize the soldiers’ and commanders’ battlefield experiences, which freed the war correspondents to be creative and glorify the individual— 15 Shimon Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documented Study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR (Luxembourg, 1995), 4. 16 Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, 2000), 160. 17 Jeffrey Brooks, “Pravda Goes to War,” in Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, ed. Richard Stites (Bloomington, 1995), 11. 18 I. I. Shirokorad, “Sovetskaia periodicheskaia pechat' v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” in Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina v otsenke molodykh: Sbornik statei, aspirantov, molodykh uchenykh (Moscow, 1997), 121. 19 “Direktiva 94 GLAVPU RKKA Voennym sovetam, Nachpufrontov, Nachpoarmov, Nachpuokrugov ob izmenenii lozungov na voennykh gazetakh,” VRA VOV 6:91. 442 Anita Kondoyanidi something that prewar propaganda shunned.20 Inevitably, the byproduct of this process became “more truthful and humane notions of agency and individual worth.”21 To rally national support for the war effort, Soviet authorities established anti-fascist committees based on nationality, gender, profession, and age: Jewish, scientific, youthbased, and many others. The Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformbiuro), the central information and propaganda agency, supervised them. Set up on June 24, 1941, the bureau acted under the aegis of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and received its orders and directives from both the Central Committee and the Commissariat. Ultimately, however, the Politburo and the Central Committee’s Propaganda Department and Secretariat had the final say on important questions.22 The Sovinformbiuro also set up press conferences for foreign correspondents—a major reversal of the usual Soviet approach to public relations— and oversaw the formulation and dissemination of official Soviet wartime information and propaganda for both domestic and foreign consumption. It issued official press and radio communiqués on the military situation and produced leaflets to be air-dropped behind enemy lines. The Sovinformbiuro maintained a network of representatives in all allied countries. In 1944 alone the bureau submitted materials to thirty-two foreign telegraph and newspaper agencies and to eighteen radio stations abroad. With the bureau’s goal to dispatch “objective information openly via official channels,” it sent out a total of 135,000 articles during the war.23 The Sovinformbiuro also recruited the most popular and prolific Soviet writers and journalists and occasionally organized meetings with them to discuss current events and issues. The bureau included regional departments, of which the most important were responsible for the United States and Great Britain. It is clear that the Sovinformbiuro was necessary to bridge the ideological gap with the Allies, which Stalin’s government, with the exception of its Foreign Commissariat, had consistently portrayed as enemies in the 1930s. To this end the bureau and MDP spent much energy and money on propagandizing the Soviet population and army. Elena Seniavskaia has argued that the soldiers’ moral-psychological state depended directly on the intensity and precision of the Soviet government’s propaganda: the ideological factor not only was intertwined with the psychological element in the wars of the twentieth century but also frequently played a leading role.24 The Sovinformbiuro, therefore, played a decisive role in mobilizing and inspiring Soviet soldiers who consistently encountered the horrors of war. Suffering and torment united the Soviet people and created in them a sense of indignation, hatred, and solidarity. However, once the Red Army pushed the Wehrmacht to the borders of Eastern Europe in 1944, many seasoned soldiers expected the war to end.25 For Directive No. 160 to war correspondents see ibid., 162–63. Brooks, “Pravda Goes to War,” 14. Both Denise Youngblood and Peter Kenez characterize the war as a “liberating experience,” which allowed film directors to express genuine feelings of sorrow for the Soviet people and hatred for the enemy, and to show the real tragedy of the Soviet people. In Kenez’s words, “the period of the war was a small oasis of freedom in the film history of the Stalinist years.” See Kenez’s Cinema and Soviet Society from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin (London, 2001), 182; and Denise Youngblood, Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005 (Lawrence, 2007), 81. 22 Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism, 4. 23 Ibid., 5. 24 E. S. Seniavskaia, Psikhologiia voiny v XX veke: Istoricheskii opyt Rossii (Moscow, 1999), 213. 25 Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York, 2006), 290. 20 21 The Liberating Experience 443 The Soviet government had to prepare the army to march into Central Europe. On May 1, 1944, Stalin gave a speech in which he explained to the Soviet soldiers that their task would be finished only with the final blow to Berlin. “The German troops today are reminiscent of a wounded beast, which has to creep away to the border of its own lair, Germany, to lick its wounds. However, a wounded beast that goes off to its lair does not stop being a dangerous beast. If we are to deliver our country and those of our Allies from the danger of enslavement, we must pursue the wounded German beast and deliver the final blow to him in his own lair.”26 Stalin’s metaphor for Berlin as a lair became one of the most popular concepts used in political indoctrination sessions for Red Army soldiers. The metaphor had its effect: soldiers employed it extensively in their slogans. The authorities also realized that, in order to revive the troops’ zeal, they more than ever needed the help of political departments. After driving the enemy out of Soviet territory, the soldiers found themselves exhausted, undernourished, and undersupplied, especially in terms of clothes. Fighting in Europe did not appeal to the majority because they longed to go home. Of no less significance was the fact that for years Soviet authorities told their citizens that Europe represented a threat to the young Soviet state. Crossing the border into the unknown world was threatening, particularly after the soldiers had liberated their own land and could return to their ruined, but liberated homes. The Soviet leaders themselves were afraid of what the Soviet soldiers might find in the capitalist world and distrusted the new unreliable recruits from Ukraine and the Baltic republics because their memory of collectivization and occupation was still fresh.27 The military press and the Main Political Department of the Army had a gargantuan task before them: to persuade reluctant soldiers to continue fighting. The slogan “Death to the occupiers of the Soviet Union” became the conceptual guide for the military press.28 Newspapers repeatedly explained that fascism was the ideology of human extermination. Pravda, Red Banner, and Red Star published articles in which journalists presented Hitler’s regime as the executioner of democratic freedoms and a system of national subjugation. Soviet newspapers described Nazi crimes on a regular basis, making “anger at discovering German atrocities ... another motive for fighting.”29 To develop the feeling of sacred wrath toward the enemy, the Sovinformbiuro published reports of the Emergency State Committees that visited the concentration camps liberated by the Red Army. The editors usually published these reports next to the articles that called upon Soviet soldiers to take vengeance on the Wehrmacht for the atrocities committed on Soviet soil.30 The newspapers repeatedly used slogans that incited soldiers to take action based on hatred: “It is impossible to defeat an enemy without learning how to hate him with all the soul’s powers,” “Sacred revenge on our banners,” “We will not forget, we will not forgive,” “Take vengeance for Kiev’s torments.”31 But neither the Sovinformbiuro nor the army’s political departments Iosif Stalin, O Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine Sovetskogo Soiuza (Moscow, 1947), 145–46. Merridale, Ivan’s War, 282. 28 S. I. Zhukov, “Frontovaia pechat'—moshchnoe sredstvo vospitaniia u voinov nenavisti k vragu,” in his Frontovaia pechat' v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (Moscow, 1968), 61. 29 Brooks, “Pravda Goes to War,” 9–27. 30 Zhukov, “Frontovaia pechat',” 62. 31 Ibid., 64. 26 27 444 Anita Kondoyanidi could invent a better piece of propaganda than what the Nazis had left behind in Poland— the extermination camps. MAJDANEK The Nazis constructed Majdanek in 1941. It had 144 barracks, each designed to hold around 300 people, one crematorium, gas chambers, numerous gallows, and a ditch for corpses. A high, electrified, barbed-wire fence surrounded the camp. At first, the Nazis executed POWs and political prisoners in Majdanek. With the implementation of the Final Solution in 1942, however, Polish Jews became the main target. When interrogated by the Polish and Soviet Extraordinary Committee, Heinz Stalbe, a member of the Kamppolizei, stated bluntly: “The main purpose of the camp was to exterminate the greatest possible number of people, and for that reason it was called the extermination camp (Vernichtungslager).”32 When Soviet soldiers liberated Majdanek on July 23, 1944, they saw a well-organized mass-murder factory. The Nazis had designed, arranged, and built every concentration camp with great precision. The result was a disturbingly efficient machine that produced human ashes for fertilizing lands around the camp and hair for making fabric.33 Red Army soldiers were aware of Babyi Yar in Kiev and “Gross Lazaret” of Slavuta in Western Ukraine, where the Nazis had murdered Jews and Soviet POWs, but these cases paled beside Majdanek, where 360,000 Poles, Jews, and members of other nationalities were put to death during the three years of the camp’s existence.34 “As the Red Army advanced to the west,” Alexander Werth has noted, “it heard these daily stories of terror, and humiliation and deportation; it saw the destroyed cities; it saw the mass-graves of Russian war prisoners, murdered or starved to death ... in the Russian soldiers’ mind, the real truth on Nazi Germany, with its Hitler and Himmler and its Untermensch philosophy and its unspeakable sadism became hideously tangible.”35 When the Red Army reached the camp, the only survivors were 480 POWs and 180 political prisoners. While the Soviet POWs wore the striped camp uniforms marked with “SU” on the front and the back, the other prisoners wore striped uniforms with a letter denoting their nationality. Gen. Dmitrii Kudriavtsev gave Lt. Gen. Nikolai Bulganin and his staff a tour of the camp. After he saw the death facilities and interviewed the survivors, Bridgman, End of the Holocaust, 18. See Józef Marszalek, Majdanek: The Concentration Camp in Lublin (Warsaw, 1986). “Even the prisoners’ hair, cut upon their admission to the camp, possessed utility value to the Third Reich. Oswald Pohl, in a secret order of August 6, 1942, addressed to concentration camp commandants, wrote that ‘human hair serves to make felt for industrial purposes and to spin yarn. Of women’s hair, either removed while combing or cut, hair yarn is produced for socks for submarine crews and for felt stockings for the railways’”; and “The ash from the incineration pyres in the vicinity of Compound 5 and in the crematorium area as well as from the new, fivefurnace crematorium opened in September 1943 was used to fertilize the vegetable gardens [at the nearby SS farm.] At the moment of liberation, 1,350 cubic meters of compost containing fragments of human bones was found in that area” (ibid., 83, 143). 34 Ibid., 142. 35 Werth, Russia at War, 768. 32 33 The Liberating Experience 445 the future Soviet Minister of Defense gave the order for all men under his command to visit the camp before they marched further west in order that they may see with their own eyes the horrors and extent of the extermination camp. He also gave an order to invite foreign diplomats and war correspondents from Moscow to visit the camp.36 Following this order, the Sovinformbiuro sent its leading war correspondents to the sites to continue its campaign of disclosure intended to make sure that Soviet soldiers never forgot the Nazi atrocities. Although Ehrenburg never visited Majdanek himself, he was the first to mention the word Majdanek in his article “On the Eve,” published by Pravda on August 7, 1944. Among all the war correspondents, Ehrenburg was the most experienced and popular. During World War I, he reported on the French Front for the independent Stock Market Gazette and covered the Spanish Civil War for the Soviet press. By 1944 his popularity reached its peak. According to Konstantin Simonov, his were the only articles that soldiers did not use for rolling cigarettes.37 Soldiers and officers perused and discussed his articles during political information meetings. The editorial staff of various divisions and ordinary soldiers wrote him letters in which they recounted their battles and asked him to mention their units in his future articles.38 Years later, rereading these letters, Ehrenburg again experienced the horror and deadly melancholy, wondering how the soldiers managed to survive during the war and where they found the strength to continue fighting.39 Memories of the camps led to insomnia and nightmares. In his memoirs, Ehrenburg recounted how the sight of half-cremated bodies made him completely numb.40 In 1944, enraged by the war of annihilation in the Soviet Union, Ehrenburg’s articles called on the soldiers to avenge Soviet losses.41 In “On the Eve,” Ehrenburg warned the Soviets not to forget the German atrocities because the Nazis had counted on the Russians’ short memory. “What about the concentration camps and killing factories?” asked Ehrenburg, “Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek for example?”42 Describing these sites, he emphasized that people of different nationalities died there: “At these killing factories, Germans murdered Jews, Soviet POWs, Russians, Belorussians, and Poles. Hangmen had 36 Irmgard von zur Mühlen (director), Holocaust: The Liberation of Majdanek, ArtsmagicDVD, Ryko Distribution, 2006. 37 Konstantin Simonov and Il'ia Erenburg, V odnoi gazete (Moscow, 1979), 16. 38 G. Prekin, “Pis'mo Ili Erenburga,” in Podvig narodnyi: Ocherki, stat'i, vospominaniia i fotodokumenty o Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, comp. N. M. Kulygin and A. M. Mamaev (Saransk, 1995), 136–37. 39 Il'ia Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn': Vospominaniia v trekh tomakh (Moscow, 1990), 2:353. 40 Ibid., 258, 262, 337. 41 Antony Beevor asserts that Ehrenburg’s strident calls for revenge gave official sanction to mistreatment at best, rape and murder at worst. See Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945 (New York, 2002), 28. When Lev Kopelev, a writer and a political officer, asked Ehrenburg to moderate his tone—Kopelev was convinced that his call for hatred and revenge was inciting the Soviet soldiers—SMERSH counterintelligence arrested him for having “engaged in the propaganda of bourgeois humanism, of pity for the enemy” (ibid., 28). According to Joshua Rubinstein, Ehrenburg became suspicious that Kopelev was “a provocateur” and dismissed him. Apparently, Kopelev started to berate Ehrenburg a decade earlier in 1934 when he came across his diatribes against Lenin. “Kopelev often referred to these pieces in discussions at the front and even claimed that Ehrenburg wrote as scathingly about the Germans as he had once written about the Bolsheviks—a claim that was substantially true” (Rubinstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg [New York, 1996], 194). 42 Il'ia Erenburg, “Nakanune,” Pravda, August 7, 1944. 446 Anita Kondoyanidi their own schedule: one day they killed Jews, another day they killed Poles, on other days, the victims were Russians.”43 Unlike Ehrenburg, Konstantin Simonov personally saw the traces of Nazi crimes at Majdanek. Informed by the Lublin commandant that a secret concentration camp, which turned out to be Majdanek, was located only a few kilometers from the city, Simonov became the first Soviet war correspondent to write about it. On July 23, 1944, after spending a week in the camp talking to the gaunt prisoners and captured security guards, he described what Soviet soldiers found there.44 He saw the gas chambers, a warehouse overflowing with shoes, and ovens with half-cremated bodies. Although he thought that he would go mad during the first day, after interviewing prisoners and witnesses from Lublin for twenty hours every day, he became used to the surroundings and sunk into torpor. Five ovens, the bottom completely covered with smoldering vertebrae and ashes ... a warehouse overflowing with shoes, its length was seventy steps and width was forty. There were shoes up to the ceiling. There were many children’s shoes. They poured corpses like potatoes out of the trucks into the ditch. They fertilized fields with human ashes, walking like ploughmen and sowing ashes out of bags. This fertilizer stunk and contained small bits of human bones. When it rained, the fertilizer turned red. The Nazis gave menstruating women a special powder, Seletra, so that abscesses appeared on their bodies. From May 1944, the Germans gassed only Jews, whereas before they had sent only weak prisoners to the gas chambers.45 During the first day, as Simonov was writing down the surviving prisoners’ testimonies, his mind refused to accept the reality of what his eyes and ears took in, so he emphasized that he understood why some readers would not believe in the camps’ existence without seeing them first hand. As would happen at Dachau in 1945, several days after the liberation of Majdanek, Red Army officers ordered two thousand German POWs to march through the camp to see with their own eyes the crimes of the SS. Judging by the soldiers’ facial expressions, Simonov observed, they could not fathom that their countrymen could bring about this horror. These observations and conversations with emaciated prisoners served Simonov as the basis for his serialized article, “The Extermination Camp,” published by Red Star on August 10, 11, and 12, 1944. In September 1944 the Soviets published Simonov’s piece about Majdanek as a separate brochure.46 Although short, it represents a thorough study of the concentration camp near Lublin. In a striking introductory paragraph, Simonov warned his readers that they were about to uncover something immense, terrifying, and incomprehensible. He had no doubt that lawyers, historians, physicians, and politicians would spend much time investigating and contemplating the horror. In the future, he hoped, the entire range of German atrocities Ibid. Konstantin Simonov, Kazhdyi den' dlinnyi (Moscow, 1965), 105. Werth wrote that Simonov was the first to describe Majdanek in the Soviet press. Pravda published his account a week after Russians entered Lublin and discovered Majdanek on July 23, 1944 (Russia at War, 796). 45 Simonov, Kazhdyi den' dlinnyi, 106. 46 Simonov, Lager Unichtozheniia (Stavropol', 1944), 10. 43 44 The Liberating Experience 447 would become known. Simonov acknowledged that he only talked to a fraction, 1 percent, of witnesses and saw only one-tenth of all the crimes, so his numbers and details were approximate. However, he could not remain silent. He described in detail the crematorium, the gas chambers, the layout of the camp, a warehouse with millions of soles and shoes, and the games that the SS guards and Gestapo agents played with their victims. He mentioned the number of prisoners, their nationalities, and—echoing Ehrenburg—repeatedly reminded his readers not to forget this horror. On the final page he made a full circle to his opening by reminding his readers that all Germans were responsible and would answer for their atrocious crimes. They should not, he warned, be allowed to blame each other, and shift all the responsibility to Hitler and the Nazi authorities. All Germans who worked at Majdanek partook in the extermination of people, some less so, some more. Some took prisoners’ laces and shoes while others pulled out their gold teeth. According to Simonov, a chain connected all of Germany to the camps.47 At one end there was a hangman, and at the other a secretary who used the prisoners’ clothes. He assured his audience that everyone would answer for these crimes when the war was over. A day after Red Star published Simonov’s account, Boris Gorbatov’s detailed article appeared in Pravda with a gripping image: “When Majdanek’s winds blew, Lublin’s inhabitants closed their windows. The wind brought the stench of corpses. It was impossible to breathe. It was impossible to eat. It was impossible to live. Majdanek’s winds brought horror.”48 The image of the Majdanek crematorium’s chimney towering over the camp and belching black smoke brought home to Soviet readers the message that the Nazis destroyed human life wherever they went. The Poles called Majdanek’s crematorium “the devil’s ovens,” wrote Gorbatov, and the Majdanek camp, “the factory of death.” The Nazis relocated Dachau’s, Buchenwald’s, and Auschwitz’s prisoners to Majdanek. Those who were strong enough to speak to Soviet authorities confessed that Majdanek was more frightening than the other killing factories. The entire camp with its crematorium, gas chambers, gallows, ditches where prisoners were shot, and even a brothel for the German personnel, covered twenty-five square kilometers. The Nazi administration paved all roads in the camp, cut the grass neatly, and lived in special quarters surrounded by flowerbeds and birchwood benches on which to rest. In the camp, according to Gorbatov’s account, one could find cabbage fields fertilized by human ashes. He noted that the entire camp resembled a modern industrial factory. As the Red Army approached Poland, the Nazis set fire to Majdanek’s crematorium, but the table where the staff undressed and dismembered the dead prisoners remained intact, and soldiers found the burned remains of human beings in the ovens. Gorbatov wrote that the Germans brought to Majdanek people of different nationalities who had survived Dachau and Flossenburg: Poles, Russians, Jews, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Italians, Frenchmen, Albanians, Croatians, Serbs, Czechs, Norwegians, Germans, Greeks, 47 48 Ibid., 37–38. Boris Gorbatov, “Majdanek,” Pravda, August 11, 1944. 448 Anita Kondoyanidi Dutchmen, and Belgians.49 Red Army soldiers also discovered a terrible monument behind the crematorium—a large warehouse filled with shoes of all colors and sizes: the exquisite shoes of a French woman lay next to the bast shoes of a Ukrainian man. Death was the great equalizer. The insatiable ovens devoured everything, Gorbatov wrote, and emitted smoke all day long. Five ovens burned fourteen hundred corpses a day, but the Germans were planning to build a second set of ovens because they visualized a gigantic factory of death. If they had had their will, argued Gorbatov, they would have turned all of Poland into a crematorium, which the Red Army prevented by putting “an end to the hellish work of the devil’s ovens.”50 Gorbatov personally interviewed camp prisoners and Lublin residents. “I lived through this,” said one of the survivors, surprised at how he could endure the torture. “I saw this!” said one of the witnesses, surprised that he had not gone mad.51 The article took up three long columns, while to the right the publishers placed four photos: the first showed the camp surrounded by electric wire, the second depicted the ovens, the third demonstrated piles of carbonized human bodies, and the fourth captured numerous images of beautiful men and women of all ages. On the next page, the editors placed a picture of several soldiers next to a huge pile of shoes, and another picture depicting piles of foreign prisoners’ passports. Concurrent with the articles published in Red Star and Pravda, the major Soviet soldiers’ newspaper, Red Army, began its own propaganda campaign summoning soldiers to continue to fight: “Soldier! Millions of enslaved Europeans look to you with hope. For the tears and grief of the people who have lost their relatives, hit the enemy harder. Soldier, the enemy wanted to exterminate many millions of people and left their bloody crimes’ traces in Russia, France, Poland, Greece, Denmark, and Norway. Let us kill Nazis. Death to the Nazis.”52 In the same issue, another article summoned the soldiers not to forget Lublin: “The entire world will know this city’s name because of the fascists’ unprecedented crimes. We are in for more knowledge about the Nazis’ crimes. Prisoners of war have told us about new crimes in Sobibor and other Polish places where more horrible crimes were committed. We must have strong nerves to withstand this. We need to preserve them for retribution against the Nazis. We need to keep our nerves and hearts for hatred.”53 The Sovinformbiuro took every chance to augment the propaganda’s effect. Until the end of September 1944, Soviet newspapers continued to bombard soldiers with slogans that tapped directly into their anger. On September 17, 1944, Red Army wrote that the blood of 1,500,000 dead in Majdanek demanded vengeance. “The severe hand of retribution will overtake and punish all the Nazi killers. The bloody executioner of Europe, Hitler’s Ibid. Although in the published article Gorbatov mentioned Jews among the victims, in his manuscript he conspicuously excluded Jews, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. A Pravda editor added these nationalities to the list and crossed out Turks and Chinese. Karel C. Berknoff made this archival find and cited it in “Total Annihilation of the Jewish Population: The Holocaust in the Soviet Media, 1941–45,” Kritika 10:1 (2009): 61–105. 50 Gorbatov, “Majdanek.” 51 Ibid. 52 Zhukov, “Frontovaia pechat',” 65. 53 Ibid. 49 The Liberating Experience 449 Germany, will answer for its crimes.”54 The barrage of slogans resumed two days later on September 19 when Red Army’s anonymous correspondent addressed the soldier as judge. “May Majdanek’s ashes pound in your heart, summoning you to sacred revenge! May your heart not know rest and your hand not tire of striking the enemy until you reach his lair and kill him there.”55 Historian Sergei Zhukov wrote that the soldiers responded eagerly to such articles. They sent numerous letters to the editors in which they held the Nazi atrocities to shame and swore to use their remaining strength to avenge the Soviet citizens’ blood and tears for all the crimes committed in Europe and the Soviet Union.56 SOVIET SOLDIERS’ REACTION TO THE ARTICLES AND THE CAMPS Both in their personal letters and during the army’s political department meetings—organized especially to discuss articles about the Soviet-liberated concentration camps—soldiers expressed great anxiety for their own families and deep hatred of the Nazis. “I read newspaper articles about the concentration camp near Lublin,” wrote comrade Kachan, a political agitator of the 4th Tank Army, “and called the entire battery to discuss them. There was an expression of total resolve on the soldiers’ faces to exact revenge mercilessly. The same day we hit the enemy hard. The enemy lost two hundred soldiers, a mortar battery, and six heavy machine-guns.” Another agitator noted that “Boris Gorbatov’s article published in Pravda greatly interested many soldiers. It caused a new wave of hatred of the enemy.”57 The head of the 47th Army’s political department, M. Kalashnik, had a special task in August and September 1944: to meet with agitators, soldiers, and all commanders of regiments and divisions to discuss articles about the Nazi crimes committed in Majdanek. He left a detailed and fascinating report that demonstrates how reading about the atrocities tapped into each soldier’s memory of violence committed against his own family and fueled his hatred. “The Germans caused us evil and misfortune,” explained Red Army soldier I. Egorkin. “These German beasts burnt to the ground our village in Mogilev province and killed its people. Majdanek was the camp for our people. This crime is calling us to take revenge on the fascists. We will take vengeance on the Nazis for their crimes.”58 Another soldier, I. Kozlov, echoed Egorkin: “I have my own score to settle with the Nazis. They killed my brother, and I still do not know anything about my mother, younger brothers and sisters who lived in Kalininskii District occupied by the Nazis. For my sorrow and my comrades’ grief, I will take revenge on the Germans mercilessly.” S. Petrachenko supported his fellow comrades, saying, “I will beat and kill the German beasts ruthlessly.” During a special Ibid., 66–67. Ibid., 66. 56 Ibid. 57 Both quotations are from “Iz doklada nachal'nika politicheskogo otdela 4-i gv. TA v PU 1-ogo Ukrainskogo fronta,” Arkhiv Ministerstvo Oborony SSSR, f. 233, op. 41794, quoted in Zhukov, “Frontovaia pechat',” 69. 58 All of the accounts given in this paragraph are from “Politicheskii otdel 47 armii, 28 sentiabria, 1944: O nastroeniiakh lichnogo sostava v sviazi s izucheniem materialov o zverstvakh nemtsev v lagere Maidanek,” U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archive (USHMMA), RG-22.008M (2001.119), f. 4, op. 2374, d. 37, l. 359. 54 55 450 Anita Kondoyanidi discussion of the report published by the Extraordinary State Commission for the Ascertainment and Investigation of Crimes Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices, a soldier of the same subdivision told his comrades: “While hearing the results of the German atrocities’ investigation in Majdanek, my heart burns with hatred. The Germans took my father, mother, and wife with two children, and they might have been killed in Majdanek. The hour of taking revenge on the German beasts has struck. I swear that I will fight the Nazis mercilessly until I pour out all of my hatred onto the Germans.” Expressing similar sentiments, another soldier in the unit, Zhurbenko, revealed that “when I go into battle, images of my wife, daughter, and two younger brothers all killed by the Nazis rise in front of me. These images summon me to go forward ferociously and take vengeance on the Germans.” According to the report, Soviet soldiers put their words into action and demonstrated their hatred as they killed Germans. For example, the soldier Zhurbenko started an attack, shouting, “We swore vengeance on Germans; forward, after me!” His comrades followed him and burst into the enemies’ trenches. Zhurbenko killed four Germans, and his comrade, Fedorenko, killed two with the butt of his rifle in hand-to-hand combat. After dispatching four Germans, Tubin, another soldier of this subdivision, wrote and disseminated a leaflet, which read: “When I went into battle, hatred for the Nazis boiled in me. I thought only about one thing—for my sister’s tears and my mother’s moan, tormented by the Germans, I must exterminate dozens of Germans. I killed four Nazis. I will multiply this count in my next attack. I summon all fighters to take revenge on and extirpate the Germans.” According to Kalashnik, the author of the report, Tubin’s leaflet made soldiers hate the enemy immensely, and during the next battle they fought the Germans heroically. When the soldier S. Smoliak heard about the German crimes committed in Majdanek, he promised that “for every drop of innocent blood, for every person the Germans killed at Majdanek, I will fight mercilessly. After everything I heard today, my heart cannot be calm. I must fight the Nazis ruthlessly.”59 Although the political departments’ reports were full of ideology and seemingly rote formula, the soldiers’ letters cited in this paper confirm these attitudes. For example, Ehrenburg’s “On the Eve” generated numerous responses from the soldiers. Some wrote directly to the author expressing their sorrow, anger, and hatred of the enemy. M. Mamud noted: “I read your article, ‘On the Eve,’ in Pravda published on August 7th. It moved me to tears.”60 Echoing Mamud, Kiva Vekselman recounted to Ehrenburg: “The day before yesterday, I read in Pravda, your article ‘On the Eve.’ I read it out loud in the presence of my comrades, but I did not have enough strength to finish the article for tears were strangling me. I recollected my beloved relatives who missed their chance to evacuate from the town of Uman.”61 A crippled Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi occupation and joined the Red Army wrote to Ehrenburg from the hospital about his experiences. Scheduled to be released in four months, he had no place to go because the Nazis had destroyed his house and killed his Ibid., l. 360. M. Mamud, “Dorogoi tov. Erenburg!” in Sovetskie evrei pishut Ile Erenburgu 1943–1966, ed. Mordekhai Altshuler et al. (Jerusalem, 1993), 147. 61 Kiva Vekselman, “Korrespondentu gazety Pravda, Ile Erenburgu,” in Sovetskie evrei pishut Ile Erenburgu, 148. 59 60 The Liberating Experience 451 parents, his wife, and his two-year-old child in 1942. He became obsessed with travelling to Majdanek. “I have only one journey to take, to Majdanek, to the storage to look for my relatives’ shoes among thousands of pairs of shoes.” He continued with sarcasm: “Instead of finding my parents, my wife, and our child, I am supposed to take these shoes and run in the streets screaming: comrades, please, be merciful, do not kill Hitler’s bandits. ... Instead of parents, wives, and children, the Nazis left us their shoes, which they, leaving in a hurry, had no time to transport to Berlin.” His letter culminated with expressions of his disbelief and loathing: “My relatives’ bodies were burnt, but their blood boils and screams: Why did they take our lives, subject us to torture, cut, torment, and burn us? Our innocently shed blood does not cease boiling until seas and rivers are filled with the German bandits’ blood. Avenge us!”62 The Main Political Department of the Red Army not only discussed numerous articles about Majdanek with Soviet soldiers but also organized special tours by former camp prisoners who knew the layout well.63 The effect was staggering. Soldiers were horrified, could hardly breathe and felt trapped during the tours.64 “We thought that there was no exit at Majdanek,” Nikolai Popel recalled. “I remembered the slogan a poet put above the gates of Pandemonium: ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!’”65 Nazi medical and registration books, which one soldier sarcastically noted “could have made any trade company proud,” repulsed the fighting men.66 The gas chambers, storehouses, and piles of dead bodies, some half-cremated, enraged soldiers the most. As Gen. Vasilii Chuikov, the commander of the Stalingrad Army that liberated Lublin and discovered Majdanek, wrote, “every Soviet soldier and officer shuddered as he walked by the storehouses of clothing stripped from children and old men and women who had been done to death here, or past the extinguished furnaces of the crematorium—shuddered at the thought that this could have been the fate of his family, too.” The general was genuinely concerned that his men might kill every German they encountered after they saw the death camp. “How much hate raged in the hearts of our soldiers when they learned of the atrocities the Nazis committed at Majdanek! It seemed that it would now be hard to get so much as one prisoner alive out of their hands,” he wrote.67 Chuikov’s fears were not unfounded; nor was he the only one who became frightened of the soldiers’ increasing hatred of all Germans. Gen. Konstantin Krainiukov noted in his memoirs that “hatred of the enemy overflowed. ... Under these circumstances, we had to redirect the built-up rage onto the right track.”68 However, it was difficult to convince soldiers. After sergeant Remizov saw the camp, he said: “Lublin’s death camp, which I visited yesterday, made me hate the Nazis even more. A horrifying picture of the German atrocities summons us to a decisive and merciless fight against the fascist beasts. It was not simply a concentration camp in Lublin, it was a true death camp, where they killed Iakov Chizhik, “Tov. Erenburg!” in Sovetskie evrei pishut Ile Ehrenburgu, 170. V. A. Radzivanovich, Pod polskim orlom (Moscow, 1959), 38–39. 64 Konstantin Mikhalenko, Sluzhu nebu! (Magadan, 1970), 242; Popel, Vperedi Berlin! 117. 65 Popel, Vperedi Berlin! 117. 66 Radzivanovich, Pod polskim orlom, 38–39. 67 V. I. Chuikov, Konets Tret'ego Reikha (Moscow, 1973), 49, 50. 68 K. V. Krainiukov, Oruzhie osobogo roda (Moscow, 1977), 406. 62 63 452 Anita Kondoyanidi 1.5 million people.”69 A fresh recruit said after he saw the camp: “During the German occupation, I witnessed their crimes, but such horrifying atrocities as I saw with my own eyes at Majdanek I had yet to see. I am a young soldier, and participated in different battles two times only, fought the Nazis ruthlessly, but now I will beat them even more for the honest people’s deaths killed at Majdanek.”70 During the meeting at Majdanek, one of Kriukov’s listeners said that he would not let any Nazi POWs live. Moreover, after the tours, echoing Stalin, Red Army soldiers wrote on their tanks such slogans as “Forward, into the fascist den!” “Revenge and death to the German aggressors!” and “Let’s hoist the flag of victory over Berlin!”71 Even allowing for rhetorical exaggeration, it seems clear that the tours served their purpose—after visiting the camp, new recruits uttered their resolve to fight until the end and to wreak terrible vengeance upon the Germans. Vladimir Lozben, whom the Red Army recruited in 1944, declared that “while visiting Majdanek, I became convinced again that the Germans exterminated not only adults there, but tens of thousands of children. Every soldier saw the children’s shoes and with hatred for the Germans said: ‘Bastards, beasts, and Nazis. There will be no mercy for you. We will take vengeance on the Germans for the death of the Soviet people.’” Sgt. I. Tipikin related similar sentiments: “What I read in the newspapers about the atrocities committed at Majdanek and my personal tour of the camp opened a terrifying picture before me, which forces us, the Red Army soldiers, to finish off quickly the German beast. I will tell my soldiers about the tour of Majdanek and will call them to fight ruthlessly against the German killers.” And then there was S. Gryzlov, who admitted that his tour of Majdanek “made a lasting effect on me. Here, the Nazis burned thousands of people like fire logs. The Germans committed atrocities unprecedented in history. When I arrive in my subdivision, I will tell my warriors and we will fight the Nazis with even more hatred.”72 There were exceptions, of course. Vasilii Chuikov believed that “true heroes could contain their wrath.” Chuikov’s senior sergeant, Iukhim Remeniuk, a machine-gunner in the 8th Guards Division, had fought bravely at Stalingrad and told his buddies that they should visit him and his family after the war. He was particularly proud of the place in the woods where he lived. When the unit liberated Remeniuk’s village, the soldiers found his cottage razed to the ground, the orchard burned, and his parents dead. The Germans had taken away his wife and daughters. The entire division took an oath to avenge Remeniuk’s family. Chuikov was astonished when Remeniuk actually took a German officer prisoner the day after the liberation of Majdanek. That Remeniuk did not kill him on the spot convinced Chuikov that his subordinate was a great man. As Chuikov wrote, “Now he stood before me, this man of heroic spirit, grim and wise. [Remeniuk] understood that the best way to achieve revenge was to annihilate the entire Fascist den.”73 The Soviet government directed its propaganda campaign not only at Red Army soldiers but also at foreign governments. The Main Political Department of the Red Army brought in Western journalists from Moscow, and the Kremlin set up a Special Commission for the “Politicheskii otdel 47 armii, 28 sentiabria, 1944,” 362. Ibid. 71 V. A. Zolotarev et. al., Velikaia Otechestvennaia Voina 1941–1945 (Moscow, 1999), 236. 72 The quotations in this paragraph are from “Politicheskii otdel 47 armii, 28 sentiabria, 1944,” 363. 73 Chuikov, Konets Tret'ego Reikha, 50, 51. 69 70 The Liberating Experience 453 Investigation of Crimes Committed by Germans at Majdanek. Later, the Soviet press attaché in London disseminated the committee’s report in the West through such papers as Soviet War News published by the Press Department of the Soviet Embassy in London. Like other articles covering Majdanek for the Soviets, “The Majdanek Inferno,” prepared by the PolishSoviet Extraordinary Committee, did not downplay the issue of Jews: “The numbers of those exterminated in the camp was constantly swelled up with new victims ... as well as by Jews brought from various ghettos set up by the Gestapo in Poland and various cities in Western Europe.”74 At this point in the war neither Stalin nor the Soviet government intended to disclose to the Allies their growing fears of the Jewish question. The Western reaction to the Soviet liberation of the extermination camps was remarkable, however. Western newsmakers questioned reports produced even by foreign correspondents. Werth who visited the camps and intended to publish his observations in the West, wrote that “the press and radio in the West were still skeptical. Typical was the BBC’s refusal to use my story.” The New York Herald Tribune responded with disbelief to Werth’s request for publication of his article: “Maybe we should wait for further corroboration of the horror story that comes from Lublin. Even on top of all we have been taught of the maniacal Nazi ruthlessness, this example sounds inconceivable. ... The picture presented by American correspondents requires no comment except that, if authentic the regime capable of such crimes deserves annihilation.”75 Westerners could not fathom that human beings could commit such atrocities. As Jean Cathala¸ a French war correspondent and Ehrenburg’s friend noted, In December [1944], when Charles De Gaulle arrived in Moscow no one in his entourage seemed to be aware of the discovery of the first death camps nor to know that Frenchmen had perished there. A diplomat whom I managed to persuade conceded immediately: “If that exists, it is only for Jews.” In the matters of horrors, the Westerners were evidently novices. The Soviets were not. The atrocities in the war in the east had taught them, but even more did the experience of their own system.”76 SOBIBOR AND TREBLINKA Red Army troops from the 1st Belorussian Front reached Treblinka and Sobibor on July 23, 1944, almost at the same time Majdanek was liberated. Compared to Majdanek and Auschwitz, however, Sobibor and Treblinka were small camps designated for the rapid extermination of Jews, Poles, and Russians. In Sobibor, between May 1942 and October 1943, the Nazis killed around 250,000 Jews, Russians, Poles, and Gypsies.77 Himmler ordered the camp closed because of an insurgency instigated by 600 prisoners who fought with the guards and escaped. Only 30 of them survived the war. To conceal the site of atrocities, the Nazis blew up all the permanent buildings, excavated the burial pits, burned the bodies, and planted pine trees where the camp stood.78 As with Sobibor, the Nazis “Soviet War News: The Majdanek Inferno September 19, 1944,” USHMMA, RG-22.004, l. 8. Werth, Russia at War, 898–99. 76 Jean Cathala, Sans Fleurs Ni Fusil (Paris, 1981), 371–72. 77 Lachendro, German Places of Extermination in Poland, 46. 78 Bridgman, End of the Holocaust, 21–22. 74 75 454 Anita Kondoyanidi destroyed Treblinka, where they had exterminated almost 881,390 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto and other parts of Poland.79 By blowing up all the buildings, plowing over the land, and making Polish workers burn the bodies, they hid the traces of their crimes. One of the Polish survivors of the war, Tomasz Gusewski, expressed his disgust and horror at completing such a task. He added that burning the bodies had a psychological effect on the Nazis too—they drank hard liquor and were often inebriated while overseeing the process.80 When the Red Army found Treblinka, they were able to locate almost forty survivors from the camp who were hiding in the pine forests. Journalist Vasilii Grossman, who was allowed to go there, interviewed these survivors and local Polish peasants. The result was a poignant account of the German atrocities committed in Treblinka, which Soviet authorities disseminated during the Nuremberg Trial. Literary critics regard it as his most powerful piece of writing. The main question that drove Grossman’s research was how the Germans managed to kill almost 800,000 people. He concluded that they achieved their goal by deceit, followed by psychological disorientation, and then sheer terror.81 When the Jews were loaded off the trains in Treblinka, they saw an artificially constructed train station complete with signs that indicated offices and exits. The prisoners saw the band greeting them with marches. The Germans worked hard to create the illusion of a regular train station. The guards asked everyone to leave their luggage at the station and proceed to the bathhouse, but the true destination was the gas chamber. After writing the piece and flying to Moscow, Grossman collapsed from nervous exhaustion, stress, and nausea. He could not attend a meeting with Cathala because of his illness. Red Banner published Grossman’s article, “The Hell Called Treblinka,” in November 1944, and during the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal Soviet authorities disseminated it as evidence for the prosecution. AUSCHWITZ The Nazis built Auschwitz in 1940. It consisted of three parts: the Auschwitz concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was the extermination facility, and the industrial site, Auschwitz-Monowitz. The Auschwitz concentration camp resembled a workers’ settlement and looked like an orderly factory whose layout resembled Majdanek’s. It had numerous barracks for prisoners, a huge crematorium, and two gas chambers on the outskirts of the camp. Its first commandant was the infamous Rudolf Hoess. When the Nazis began to implement the Final Solution, he was the first one to embrace and implement the new orders.82 It is in Auschwitz that the Nazis first used the crystal-blue Zyklon B gas. Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. Gen. Fedor M. Krasavin, the commander of the 100th Infantry Division, which liberated Auschwitz, called 79 Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington, 1987), 392–98. 80 Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State, DVD, pt. 3 of 6-part London BBC series (2005). 81 Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova, eds., A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941– 1945 (New York, 2005), 281. See the review of this book by John Garrard in Slavic and East European Journal 51 (Spring 2007): 167–68, which points out a number of errors. 82 For a detailed history of Auschwitz see Sybille Steinbacher, Auschwitz: A History, trans. Shaun Whiteside (New York, 2005). The Liberating Experience 455 Lt. Gen. Vasilii Petrenko, who was the commander of the 107th Infantry Division, asking him to come to the camp. When Petrenko entered it on January 29, 1945, it was snowing. Emaciated prisoners approached him and began to speak in different languages. Writing fifty-five years later, he notes: “I who saw people dying every day was shocked by the Nazis’ indescribable hatred toward the inmates who had turned into living skeletons. I read about the Nazis’ treatment of Jews in various leaflets, but there was nothing about the Nazis’ treatment of women, children, and old men. It was at Auschwitz that I found out about the fate of the Jews.”83 Two inmates stopped, smiled, applauded, and pointed at his Hero of the Soviet Union medal. He asked them: “Are you glad you are free? Where are you going now? Who are you?” They told him that they were from Belgium. “I remember two women who came up to me, hugged and kissed me,” Petrenko wrote. “These were people who could still smile. There were also those who could only stand in complete silence, not a person and not a living skeleton. At Auschwitz, I saw a barrack for women where blood and excrement were everywhere; corpses lay all around—a horrible scene. One could not be there more than five minutes because there was such a horrible smell of decomposing bodies.”84 It was hard to find normal people in Auschwitz, recollected Petrenko. Georgii Elisavetskii, who became the Soviet commandant of Auschwitz, thought that one could lose one’s mind just by entering the camp and encountering the victims.85 Like Petrenko, he was one of the first Soviet officers to enter Auschwitz: My blood runs cold when I mention Auschwitz even now. The cynical Nazi greeting above the gates of the concentration camp, “Arbeit macht frei,” which I read on January 27th, 1945, for the first time stands out in my memory. ... When I entered the barrack, I saw living skeletons lying on the three tiered bunks. As in fog, I hear my soldiers saying: “You are free, comrades!” I sense that they do not understand [us] and begin speaking to them in Russian, Polish, German, Ukrainian dialects; unbuttoning my leather jacket, I show them my medals. ... Then I use Yiddish. Their reaction is unpredictable. They think that I am provoking them. They begin to hide. And only when I said to them: “Do not be afraid, I am a colonel of Soviet Army and a Jew. We have come to liberate you. ... Finally, as if the barrier collapsed ... they rushed towards us shouting, fell on their knees, kissed the flaps of our overcoats, and threw their arms around our legs. And we could not move, stood motionless while unexpected tears rolled down our cheeks.86 Soviet authorities sent the 108th, 322nd, and 107th Army Medical Units to the camp and redirected mobile kitchens to Auschwitz so the inmates finally could eat real food. Petrenko checked the barracks, which shocked him, and then went to examine the gas chambers and crematorium, which the Germans had blown up. The ghastly condition of the children distressed him the most: stomachs swollen from hunger, wandering eyes, arms resembling lashes. The children had very thin legs and huge heads. The rest of the body Vasilii Petrenko, Do i posle Osventsima (Moscow, 2000), 111–12. Ibid., 112. 85 Georgii Elisavetskii, “Moia liubushnaia Nenusia!” in Sokhrani moi pis'ma: Sbornik pisem i dnevnikov evreev perioda Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, comp. Il'ia Al'tman and Leonid Terushkin (Moscow, 2007), 300. 86 Georgii Elisavetskii, My vmeste srazhalis' (Moscow, 1980), 224–25. 83 84 456 Anita Kondoyanidi did not seem human because it looked as if it had been sewed on. They were silent and showed only numbers tattooed on their arms. Petrenko wrote that the inmates did not cry. The former prisoners wiped their eyes, but they remained dry.87 Another officer who visited Auschwitz, Vasilii Davydov, a commander of the Guards’ Mortar Regiment, wrote to his wife: Now everyone knows how the fascists treated the prisoners of war, the occupied territories’ population, and what politics they propagated. We saw many times the consequences of Nazi policy. But nothing can be compared with what we saw and heard at the well-known, massive death camp, Auschwitz. We visited it the day after the liberation when everything was still on fire or exuded smoke. Wherever one looked, he saw piles of human bodies. In some places, the former prisoners, looking like living skeletons, sat or lay around. Many of them could not be helped. A few who could still walk took us around the camp and told us about what happened there. It is impossible to describe everything we saw there. When we were there, the State Committee started to investigate the fascists’ terrible crimes. They opened huge ditches filled with human corpses, bones, and ashes (the fascists sold these ashes as fertilizer for five marks a pound). As it turned out later, in this camp alone, 4 million people died—old men and children, men, and women from all European countries, many from the USSR.88 For many Soviet officers and soldiers, their visit to an extermination camp revealed the Nazis’ organized extermination of people and corroborated what the Sovinformbiuro and the political departments had taught them from the very beginning of the war—that the Nazis propagated organized murder and an extermination policy based on their racist ideology. If on their own land the Soviet soldiers encountered mass graves and terrible atrocities, in Poland they uncovered an even more massive and well-organized extermination project. After visiting Auschwitz, a twenty-six-year-old soldier, Pyotr Nikitin, wrote to his relatives in May 1945: My dear ones, I would like to describe to you how the accursed German bandits tortured people. Not long ago we visited Auschwitz, where the Nazis founded a death camp. The entire territory of the camp is 50 kilometers. The most horrifying is the crematorium with 8–12 ovens where the Germans burned the corpses of the lacerated and worn out victims. I talked to the prisoners. They told me about terrifying, inhuman tortures. My dear ones, I have no words to relate to you what we had seen on our difficult soldiers’ path. How to settle accounts with these bloody, damned fascist-degenerates for all their evil deeds? There is no punishment horrible enough, and no one could ever come up with an appropriate retribution. Please know, my dear parents, that we will take revenge on the enemy for everything. We will forget nothing, and we will never forgive.89 Petrenko, Do i posle Osventsima, 113. Vasilii Davydov, “Ot Volgi do Elby,” Sud'by, opalennye voinoi, ed. M. P. Roshchevskii (Syktyvkar, 1995), 110–11. 89 Petr Nikitin, “Mai 1, 1945,” in My osvobodili rodnuiu sovetskuiu zemliu: Pis'ma s fronta, pis'ma na front, ed. N. M. Minin and N. V. Shumeiko (Petrozavodsk, 1990), 175–76. 87 88 The Liberating Experience 457 Soviet soldiers compared the excursions to Auschwitz with visits to Hell. A fighter bomber pilot, Col. Valerii Levin, reminisced in 2005 that his entire division was invited to visit Auschwitz. Many volunteered to go, but when they arrived there, soldiers thought that they were in “true Hell.” Although they had steel nerves and had seen many atrocities, what they witnessed in the concentration camp shocked them. When they returned, the pilots met German POWs. A few of the Soviet soldiers lost their temper and reached for their guns, but Levin held them back.90 Aleksandr Vorontsov, a Soviet cameraman attached to the First Ukrainian Front, photographed Auschwitz after Soviet troops entered the camp around 3:00 P.M. on January 27, 1945. He did not receive concrete instructions about how to make the film. “I had heard about Auschwitz before,” Vorontsov noted, but everything I saw and filmed was far more terrible than anything I had seen or filmed during the Great Patriotic War. Hundreds of people stood by the barbed wire fences and looked at our soldiers. There was fear in their eyes. They did not know that these were Soviet soldiers, that these were liberators. They had expected the worse and expected death. We took pictures of the faces of these human beings. A Soviet special commission arrived two days after the camp was freed. Soviet soldiers found large quantities of cyanide B along with gas masks worn by the sanitary workers when they administered the poison, preparation for medical experiments on inmates.”91 As in Majdanek, the findings were shocking. “We had a terrible picture before our eyes,” recalled Vorontsov. “A huge number of barracks. Many almost roofless. In many of them, human beings lay on plank beds. They were skeletons covered with skin with a faraway look in their eyes. It was hard to bring them back to life.” At first, the Soviet cameramen could not document the conditions in the barracks because the Nazis had cut off the heat and power after they had left on January 19. They had also set some barracks on fire. Several days later, after the snow melted, Vorontsov asked the Polish women prisoners to return to the barracks so that he could film the conditions under which they had lived. Soviet soldiers and Polish volunteers treated the survivors, many of whom were ill. At first, they had no time to bury the dead. Over five hundred bodies lay scattered all over the camp, victims of the last days under SS control. Vorontsov related: “Naturally, we spoke with these people, but our conversations with them were short. Those who had stayed alive had no energy and it was difficult for them to say anything comprehensible about their time in the camp. They were hungry, they were feeble, and they were sick, so our so-called interviews were very short. We wrote down what they told us.” As in Majdanek, soldiers found piles of human clothing, hair, and teeth. “On the territory of the camp were what I would call pyramids. In one clothing was piled, the other contained pots, the third human teeth.” A Polish nurse led Soviet journalists to the mass graves. Soviet specialists conducted autopsies. Vorontsov noted: “I don’t think even our military commanders guessed at the scale of the crime committed in this, the largest, concentration camp. The memory of it has Valerii Levin, Frontovymi i voennymi dorogami (Sergiev Posad, 2005), 50–51. The information provided in the next two paragraphs is based on the DVD Holocaust: Liberation of Auschwitz. 90 91 458 Anita Kondoyanidi stayed with me all my life. It was more shocking and horrible than anything I had seen or filmed during the war.” Supervised by the Soviet soldiers, men cleaned up the territory of the crematorium. General Kudriavtsev, the head of the Soviet State Extraordinary Committee, allowed a proper Jewish funeral to be performed for the victims, but unfortunately his eulogy has not survived. Those prisoners who could still walk and speak were eager to talk to Soviet soldiers, as Petrenko indicated, but those who were weak had a hard time trusting strangers. Vorontsov explained: “As we talked to the people and told them who we were, and what we were there for they began to trust us and to show more warmth. The women cried, the men as well. That must not be covered up. Children, they did not understand who we were and what we had come for. Later their parents explained it to them and they began, like the adults, both women and men, to smile some. There were tears in their eyes also.” The Soviet authorities wanted to stage a film of the triumphant liberation of Auschwitz when the prisoners were strong enough to participate in it, but it was never released because it did not correspond to the bleak reality of January 27. Even forty years later, Vorontsov confessed, “time has had no power over these memories of mine. It has not erased the horror of what I saw and recorded.” For the Red Army soldiers who liberated Auschwitz the nationality of the inmates did not seem to be of importance. Petrenko asked a few prisoners where they were from because he was shocked by the diverse group of survivors. The horror of the scene eclipsed comprehension. Although the soldiers did not express it directly, the Kremlin knew exactly how to present the results of the investigation to the world. Soviet authorities assigned only one leading war correspondent, Boris Polevoi, to write about the liberation of Auschwitz and postponed publication of the Extraordinary State Committee’s report. In his emotional albeit brief account, Polevoi conspicuously omitted nationalities of all prisoners at the concentration camp.92 After the initial batch of publications in the Soviet press, the issue of “Jews” disappeared from the newspapers. There may be myriad inscrutable and intangible reasons why Soviet authorities decided to conceal this information, but two stand out. First, by the spring of 1944, the fall of Berlin became a question of time and Stalin wanted to enter the capital first, so that the crown of victory would be his. He wanted no distractions and all attention was directed at the final goal. Second, Stalin desired the crown of “victimhood” for the Soviet Union. That is why the Extraordinary Committee report about Auschwitz appeared in all main newspapers only on May 7. Unlike the Extraordinary Committee report about Majdanek, which informed the public that the Nazis had filled the camp with Jews from West European ghettos, the lengthy summary of the Auschwitz committee did not mention Jews at all.93 There was also no mention of the concentration camps or the Jews on the Soviet War B. Polevoi, “Kombinat smerti v Osventsime,” Pravda, February 2, 1945. “Kommiunike Polsko-sovetskoi chrezvychainoi komissii po rassledovaniiu zlodeianii nemtsev, sovershennykh v lagere unichtozheniia na Maidaneke v gorode Liublin,” Pravda, August 16, 1944; “Soobshchenie chrezvychainoi gosudarstvennoi komissii: O chudovishchnykh prestupleniiakh germanskogo pravitel'stva v Osventsime,” Pravda, May 7, 1945. 92 93 The Liberating Experience 459 Memorial and military cemetery in Berlin’s Treptower Park, which opened on May 8, 1949, and served as the central war memorial in East Germany.94 THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND THE JEWS Why did the Soviet government conceal the shocking truth about the number of Jewish deaths in Auschwitz? Why did the Soviet government erase Jews from the narrative of the war after 1945? As Ehrenburg wrote, “once they had won their freedom, the Russian people forgot the persecution of Jews as a bad dream.”95 For Ehrenburg, the growth of Soviet anti-Semitism became a bitter revelation. An internationalist and cosmopolitan, Ehrenburg claimed that he became a Jew during the war: “Real Anti-Semites, not imaginary blood line loyalties, made me think that I am a Jew.”96 By the end of the war, he was not the only one who wondered about the silencing of Soviet Jews. In April 1944, Ehrenburg received letters from Jewish compatriots who expressed their indignation at rising antiSemitism in the USSR. Major Gorenbein was enraged when he found out that the presidium of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences fired eleven Jewish academicians in 1944, even though Jewish soldiers had demonstrated just as much heroism and courage during the war as had Ukrainians, Russians, and Belorussians, the largest ethnicities of the multinational socialist state. He brought to Ehrenburg’s attention the fact that thirty-two thousand Jewish soldiers had distinguished themselves during the war.97 In 1957, Ukrainian authorities proposed building a park and an athletic stadium at Babii Yar, an idea that infuriated Ehrenburg.98 Ehrenburg’s efforts to publish in Russian a Black Book, a collection of documents, witness testimonies, and letters about crimes committed by the Nazis against the Soviet Jews, failed: he only managed to publish a few excerpts in two issues of Znamia. The Soviet government preferred to publish this information in Yiddish, to limit the potential audience to Jewish readers.99 By the end of the war, the editors of the newspapers forbade Ehrenburg to write about Jewish heroes. What caused such a drastic shift in Soviet coverage of Jewish victims in the concentration camps? Solzhenitsyn believed that in 1941 the Soviet authorities took special measures to evacuate the Jewish population and to alleviate its spontaneous and uncontrolled migration. “For the Soviet government, evacuation of all Jews, be they state personnel or simple workers, represented a priority,” he wrote. “Soviet authorities allowed thousands of trains to be used for the evacuation of Jews.”100 According to Ilya Altman, however, there are no original I am grateful to Amy Nelson for pointing this out to me. Louise McReynolds, “Dateline Stalingrad,” in Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, 35. 96 Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn' 2:352. 97 Gorenbein, “Dorogoi Il'ia Erenburg,” in Sovetskie evrei pishut Ile Erenburgu, 134. In comparison, there were 37,036 Belorussians, 219,241 Ukranians, and 1,053,062 Russians on the list, all three being large ethnic categories. 98 Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (Tuscaloosa, 1999), 440. 99 Mordekhai Altshuler, “Erenburg i evrei,” in Sovetskie evrei pishut Ile Erenburgu, 63. 100 Quoted in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Dvesti let vmeste (Moscow, 2000), 343–44. He based this claim on the information from Rescue: Information Bulletin of the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society 3:7– 8 (July–August 1946): 2. 94 95 460 Anita Kondoyanidi documents which corroborate this claim. Perhaps the mass evacuations of Jews were the unintended consequence of the Soviet evacuation policy.101 For the Soviet government, people with valuable professions and education were a priority. Therefore, Jews, the majority of whom were highly educated, were “valuable assets” that the Soviet government evacuated from the Western territories. At the beginning of the war, the Soviet government needed Jewish support. The authorities used the Jewish intelligentsia to sustain the Soviet war effort. Mordecai Altshuler noted that “the [Soviet] regime created the [Anti-Fascist Jewish] Committee for the specific purpose of collecting material and disseminating it, primarily abroad, among the Jewish communities in the West.”102 The Anti-Fascist Committee, which won the support of the American Jewish Diaspora, brought in more than $20 million from the United States, published twenty thousand works about Jewish heroism and the Holocaust in the West, and organized rallies that received wide coverage in the Soviet Union and the West.103 In 1941 and 1942, Soviet leaders still mentioned the extermination of the Jews in their speeches. Altman points out that official Soviet declarations argued correctly that the Nazi invasion would bring suffering and death to all Soviet people. However, Soviet authorities never emphasized the calculated extermination of Jews. In his public speech on November 7, 1941, Stalin accused the Nazis of organizing pogroms against the Jews reminiscent of medieval times. This was the only time that Stalin was so specific. Molotov’s speech on January 6, 1942, contained a paragraph devoted to the tragedy at Babii Yar and the deaths of fifty-two thousand Jews from Kiev, a fact he could not ignore. Four months later, Molotov declared that the extermination of Soviet citizens occurred regardless of their nationality. Altman believes that in 1942 the Soviets did not follow a deliberate anti-Semitic policy. While Soviet propaganda aimed at uniting people and summoning Red Army soldiers for revenge, Nazi propaganda projected the idea that Nazis were on a mission to free the USSR from the Jews and Communists. Since the Soviet government feared that Red Army soldiers would believe Nazi propaganda, by concealing the Germans’ treatment of the Jewish POWs, the government attempted to prevent Red Army soldiers from handing Jewish officers and soldiers to the Nazis.104 Although the Red Army was officially internationalist, soldiers manifested racist attitudes in private. As Catherine Merridale noted, “it would only have been in a burst of passionate idealism that a Jew could have seen the Red Army as a benign environment. Official rhetoric was scrupulous, but among themselves the soldiers—and even many officers—were liberal with their racist gibes.”105 The Soviet government was well aware of the anti-Semitic attitudes in the Red Army and made soldiers liable to punishment if they used offensive, racist language. Newspaper coverage of the liberation of the concentration camps demonstrates that the Soviet attitude toward Jews changed by January 1945. Four articles about Majdanek Il'ia Al'tman, Zhertvy nenavisti: Kholokost v Rossii 1941–1945 gg. (Moscow, 2002), 388–89. Mordecai Altshuler, “The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR in Light of New Documentation,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, ed. Jonathan Frankel (Bloomington, 1984), 258. 103 Al'tman, Zhertvy nenavisti, 390–94. 104 Ibid., 391. 105 Merridale, Ivan’s War, 289–90. 101 102 The Liberating Experience 461 appeared between August 7th and 12th, 1944, in the immediate aftermath of the camp’s liberation. The report of the Extraordinary State Committee, which Pravda editors published on September 16, 1944, stated that Jews from West European and Polish ghettos filled the extermination lists.106 By January 1945, however, Stalin’s priorities had changed, and his subordinates understood this well. Although the Soviet public found out about Auschwitz on October 27, 1944, the Soviet troops did not receive orders to liberate it.107 Moreover, the Extraordinary State Committee made no mention at all of Jews in its report of May 7, 1945. Stalin and his subordinates realized that the crown of “victimhood” was at stake.108 The Soviet government saw itself as the main victim of the war. While the Allies vacillated, it stood alone defending its population and territory. Merridale has argued that “internationally, victimhood” became useful capital and “it permitted the aggrieved party to claim substantial reparation, to say nothing of allowing a certain moral leverage.”109 Among Red Army soldiers, the idea of “victimhood” gave rise to patriotism and heroism. However, the gruesome truth could not be avoided: the Germans killed Jews by the millions in the concentration camps. The Soviet case is not unique. France and the United States failed to acknowledge the Holocaust after the war. For years the Holocaust was swept under the rug, and only in the 1960s did it become a topic of wide discussion and serious study. This process of recognition is not over yet. “Even now,” Omer Bartov recently wrote, “as independent Ukraine struggles to reassert its still intensely disputed national identity, this known ... but deeply buried secret, emerges once more ... not as an event to be remembered but as one to be cast away or rewritten in a manner that will serve the goals of those who have inherited the land.”110 Soviet authorities used the media as a useful political tool to propagate their agenda.111 The political indoctrination sessions affected the soldiers’ mentality and willingness to fight. The loss of their families and visits to the extermination camps also played an enormous role in shaping their perception of their enemy and the war. After they saw the camps for themselves, soldiers became more enraged and eager to kill Nazis. In contrast to how the Nazis had killed millions of Jews in cold blood, Soviet troops were passionate for revenge. Anger and hatred inspired them to continue to fight. As historian Christopher Duffy has written, “by 1945, Russian military men of every rank went to war with personal scores to settle.” Although Duffy agrees that the concentration camps contributed to the Red Army’s mission to inflame patriotic hatred, he also believes that the Soviet soldiers manifested “cruelty on a scale which far exceeds that which might have been expected from men who had been brutalized by a pitiless war.”112 Red Army soldiers raped, plundered, and massacred thousands of German and some East European civilians. The Russian barbarities in turn “Kommiunike Polsko-sovetskoi chrezvychainoi komissii.” Al'tman, Zhertvy nenavisti, 407. 108 Merridale, Ivan’s War, 289–90. 109 Ibid., 290. 110 Omer Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton, 2007), xvii. 111 McReynolds, “Dateline Stalingrad,” 39. 112 Christopher Duffy, Red Storm on the Reich (New York, 1991), 273, 275. 106 107 462 Anita Kondoyanidi stiffened German resistance. Duffy argues that the Soviet soldiers’ excesses contributed to the survival of the Reich until the early summer of 1945. Although Stalin did not order Soviet troops to commit atrocities against the German population, he did nothing to prevent it. “Ordinary soldiers treated atrocity as routine, a cruel prerequisite of war.”113 For months the Red Army’s political departments carried out a thorough campaign of instructing Soviet soldiers. Fueled by the newspapers’ propaganda campaign, political indoctrination sessions, fear of the capitalist world, and personal tragedy, Red Army soldiers fought mercilessly. The tours of the extermination camps tapped directly into their anger. By the end of the conflict, the Red Army’s rank and file had internalized so much hatred, anger, and thirst for retribution that it was hard to prevent them from committing such cruelties. In their minds, the existence of the German concentration camps far exceeded the extent of their revenge, which by the end of the war had become routine. 113 Overy, Russia’s War, 262.